Important Injunctions On Aqidah - 1.5

This short series provides a rather detailed explanation on the tenets of ALL Muslims - i.e. adherents of the Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jama'ah. I invite all of us to read this series with due care, concern, importance and urgency, so that we double-check our stance with regards to our Basic Tenets of Faith; as laxity in doing so may cost us the difference between Jannah and Jahannam.

Bismillah.


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Allah's Will

Allah Most High wills all that exists and directs all events. Nothing occurs in the physical or spiritual world, be it meager or much, little or great, good or evil, of benefit or detriment, faith or unbelief, knowledge or ignorance, triumph or ruin, increase or decrease, obedience or sin; save through His ordinance, apportionment, wisdom, and decision. What He wills is, and what He does not will is not. Neither sidelong glance nor passing thought is beyond His design. He originates all and returns it, does what He wills, and none can repulse His command. There is no rescinding His destiny, no flight for a servant from disobeying Him except through divinely given success therein and mercy, and no strength to obey Him save through His choice and decree.

If all mankind, jinn, angels, and devils combined their efforts to move or to still a single particle of the universe without His will and choice, they would be unable to. His will, like His other attributes, exists in His entity and He ever possesses it. He has willed from preeternity the existence of all things at the times He has chosen. They occur at the times which He has destined from beginningless eternity, occurring neither before nor after, but taking place in accordance with His knowledge and will, without substitution or alternation. He directs events without successive throughts or waiting for time to elapse, which is why nothing divers Him from anything else.


Allah's Hearing and Sight

Allah Most High is all-hearing and all-seeing. He hears and sees, no sound however slight eluding His hearing, and no sight however minute escaping His vision. Distance does not obscure His hearing nor darkness hinder His vision. He sees without pupil or eyelids, and hears without ear canal or ears, just as He knows without a heart, seizes without limb, and creates without implement. His attributes no more resemble the attributes of His creatures than His entity resembles the entity of His creatures.


Allah's Speech

Allah Most High speaks, commands, forbids, promises, and warns, with beginninglessly eternal speech that is an attribute of His entity, not resembling the speech of creatures in being a sound generated by the passage of air or impact of bodies, nor in letters articulated by compressing the lips or moving the tongue. The Qur'an, Torah, Evangel, and Psalms are His Books, revealed to His Messengers (upon whom be peace). The Qur'an is recited with tongues, written in books, and memorised in hearts despite being beginninglessly eternal, an attribute of the entity of Allah Most High, unsubject to disseverance and separation by conveyance to hearts or pages. Musa AS heard the speech of Allah without sound or letter, just as the righteous see the entity of Allah Most High in the afterlife without substance or accident.

Since Allah possesses all of the above attributes, He is living, knowing, omnipotent, willing, hearing, seeing, and seeking by virtue of His life, power, knowledge, will, hearing, sight, and speech, not merely by virtue of His entity.


Allah's Acts

Everything besides Allah Glorious and Exalted exists through His action, proceeding from His justice in the best, fullet, most perfect and equitable way. He is wise in His acts and just in His decrees. His justice is not comparable to the justice of His servants, since injustice may only be imagined from a servant through his disposal of what belongs to another, while this is inconceiveable from Allah Most High, since nothing belongs to anyone besides Him that He should unjustly disclose of it. Everything besides Him, be it human, jinn, angel, devil, heaven, earth, animal, vegetable, mineral, substance, accident, intelligible, or sensory, is contingent, and was brought into existence through His power after not being, created by Him after it was nothing. He alone existed in preeternity, and nothing else. He then originated creation, that His omnipotence might be mainfest, His prior decree effected, and His eternal word realised; not from needing or requiring anything in creation.

Our origination, beginning, and responsibility are of Allah's generosity, not because of their being obligatory for Him, and His blessings and benefaction exist because of His favour, not because of being due from Him. Everything that exists is indebted to Him for His generosity and goodness, His blessings and benevolence; for He is well able to pour all manner of torments upon His servants and try them with every variety of suffering and illness, and were He to do so, it would be just on His part and not wicked or unfair. Allah Mighty and Majestic, rewards His servants, the believers, for their acts of obedience because of His generosity and in fulfillment of His word, not because of their deserving it or His owing it to them. He is not obliged to anyone to do anything, nor is injustice on His part conveivable, for He does not owe any rights to anyone. The obligation of men and jinn to perform acts of obedience is established by His having informed them of it upon the tongues of the prophets AS, and not by unaided human reason. He sent the prophets and manifested the truth of their messages by unmistakable, inimitable miracles. They have communicated His commands, prohibitions, promises and warnings, and it is obligatory for mankind and jinn to believe in what they have conveyed.